Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Braided
This morning, I bought Braid online, and of course Jake’s the one who’s playing right now. Truly the mark of incipient old age: whether it’s chess or Braid or some tower game (Defense Grid the Awakening, to be exact), I’d rather watch my son play than get involved myself.
Braid is a Super Mario-style game with fiendishly clever puzzles all based upon the main character’s ability to manipulate time. His time-shifting abilities differ from one world to the next; for example, in the first world he only has a rewind function, while in a subsequent world, his motion (left versus right) controls time’s arrow. The result is that the exact same puzzle map in one world has a wildly different solution in the next.
There is a certain amount of arcade-style coordination-intensive keypunching which I dislike, but this seems to be unavoidable in scrollers like this (Oddworld, which I love dearly, has a similar flaw). I wish my puzzle games were puzzles and nothing more. Still, I prefer Braid to the Myst/Riven/Uru games, where you bang your head up against a wall trying to figure out how this lever makes that doowhizzle spin in order to make a gearbox door open, thus allowing you to let the light from Keyhole A hit Lens B just so, opening a door to Engine Room C . . . you get the idea.
Braid’s music is great, too. Unfortunately, you’ll be screwing with time so much (and thus, screwing with the soundtrack) that you’ll feel like a 1960s teenager searching for secret messages on Abbey Road.
The main character wants to find his girlfriend the Princess. Their relationship has hit the skids and has somehow wandered off into the realm of the hopeless. Hell, he can’t even find her (she’s been kidnapped by a monster, I think — don’t you hate it when that happens?) But he has learned from his mistakes, and now, wiser, he wants to go back in time to make things right.
This story is told in brief snatches between worlds (levels). The writing is alternately impressive and annoying, possibly the work of someone with a lot of raw but unpolished talent. Sometimes the author tries a little too hard.
I predict that when the little guy in the dress jacket finally finds his princess, no combination of time-shifting abilities will make things right again. Or at least, that’s how I would end things.
D.
